Coming up the elevator of my office building last Thursday, a bicycle messenger spied me and (perhaps sensing a sympathetic ear) blurted out: "We're getting our asses kicked over there, and they're not telling us what's going on."

I'm not much for man-in-the-street generalizations, but my excitable new acquaintance was clearly channeling something significant about the media coverage of Gulf War II -- namely that expectations and reality have collided in a way not seen in this country since the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Except for the brief moment of clarity brought on by the photograph of the U.S. Army Ranger corpse being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993, Americans have pretty much forgotten that war is about death -- the bloody kind. Or that the natives, whoever rules them, don't often take kindly to foreigners with guns.

Which isn't to say that the U.S.-led forces are losing Gulf War II in a conventional military sense, or that the "embedded" reporters' coverage has been particularly good. But so many PR man-hours were devoted to promoting American military invincibility during the prewar sales campaign, that the ordinary citizen (and journalist) might be excused for thinking that "shock and awe" could, by itself, conquer another country.

Certain things haven't changed about U.S. war correspondents since the last gulf war. Credulity and misplaced patriotism remain the rule; dispassionate reporting meant to inform rather than inspire remains the exception. If you compare the BBC or French channels and CNN, the French and British appear to be suitably sober, while the CNN reporters and anchors seemed thrilled to be along for the ride.

On the first Saturday of the war, Walter Rodgers of CNN actually said he was having "great fun," in response to anchor Aaron Brown's unwarranted praise for Mr. Rodgers's "terrific . . . reporting" (which included such extrasensory observations as "there were whole families standing up there waving white pieces of cloth that looked like pillow cases indicating they surrender. They had no hostile feelings"). Perhaps Mr. Rodgers's enthusiasm might have diminished had he recalled on camera that this same 7th Cavalry Regiment with whom he rode toward Baghdad had once been led by General George Custer.

But with the sandstorm and paramilitary counterattacks came shock, if not awe. Even skeptics like myself expected to see at least some Iraqis welcoming GIs with grateful smiles; instead, we found a surprisingly hostile landscape (They're shooting at our guys? They don't love us? Even in Basra?).

Most U.S. war reporting has been, by government design, remote from combat -- reconstructions by spokesmen in the rear. The absence of hard news has led to endless feature stories about lonely soldiers far from home, supplies being loaded and unloaded, armored vehicles and infantry moving from hither to yon, and, inevitably, videos of smart bombs precisely hitting their targets.

Nevertheless, Ted Koppel's presentation of two Iraqi corpses on ABC-TV has already revealed more about the consequences of organized violence than we saw in all six weeks of the first gulf war, with its tightly controlled pool coverage. And a few reporters, like Newsday's Letta Tayler, have actually described combat and death the way it's supposed to be done: " 'It was kind of nice to get it out of the way,' Marine Corporal Mark Hylen said of his first killing of an Iraqi. He paused for a minute, then appeared to dismiss whatever thought was emerging. 'Screw him,' he said. 'He died.' "

American casualties are another matter. The Pentagon's hosting of 500 hacks has engendered enough goodwill or gratitude that self-censorship seems to be accomplishing the public relations mission that overt censorship did during Gulf War I. U.S. TV networks and newspapers, for the most part, obscured the gruesome Iraqi footage (via al-Jazeera) of U.S. soldiers killed in an ambush on March 23. The PoWs got more play, but the U.S. media continued to treat war reporting as a matter of taste rather than a constitutional responsibility to inform the citizenry.

The highbrow newspapers have been similarly squeamish about exhibiting the gore of war. Last Thursday, March 27, morning newspapers everywhere carried front-page stories about the explosions (possibly caused by errant American bombs) in a working-class neighborhood of Baghdad, which killed at least 17 civilians and wounded 45. The New York Times and Paris's Le Figaro both ran photographs of the devastation taken by Goran Tomasevic of Reuters. The Times selected a color picture of an anguished young man, very much alive, in front of the burning wreckage of two cars; Le Figaro ran a different shot by Mr. Tomasevic -- a black-and-white one of a hideously charred corpse, face partially visible, prostrate in front an anguished child.

War reporting will tend to improve if the military situation stagnates or deteriorates, which is paradoxical good news for the American people. I think the most realistic war coverage is the best war coverage -- not just because I'm against this war and would like people to be revolted by it -- but because I think it's better for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Realism and candor can save lives, because it puts political pressure on the civilian commanders to fight more intelligently, and at least to think about trying to minimize casualties.

And candor is seeping out everywhere, such as the recent admission by Lieutenant-General William Wallace that "the enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we wargamed against." Gen. Wallace's remark emboldened the normally docile Pentagon press corps into challenging Donald Rumsfeld on military strategy (he responded as petulantly as any dictatorial CEO contradicted by a subordinate). When officers start complaining to journalists, it usually means they're covering their backsides by talking over their bosses' heads to the politicians and the people.

We're not quite at the Vietnam-style five o'clock follies stage, but the nervousness of the military is starting to show. All the nicey-nice treatment of the "embeds" looks a little hollow after four "unilateral" journalists (two Israeli, two Portugese) were roughed up and expelled from Iraq by the U.S. Army because they posed a "security threat."

During Vietnam, a so-called "credibility gap" developed when military claims diverged more and more widely from easily viewed reality on the ground. With dozens of reporters in Baghdad and hundreds more with American forces, the longer this goes on, the harder it will be to suppress the real story.

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, is author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.

© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

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